Recent viewings

I’m starting to catch up on a few movies from last year that I missed, though I’m still woefully behind on pretty much every major award nominee. An Inconvenient Truth was better (and scarier) than expected; Hard Candy made me want to take a shower when it was over; and Grandma’s Boy was a very regrettable decision. There should be a special rating system for movies like that. Like “S-15”: viewers over 15 must be stoned.

Sloan put on a good ol’-fashioned show of the rock music on Thursday. There were a few too many shuffle beats, but otherwise a stompin’ good time was had by all.

Finally, I’ve started to watch the complete Ring Des Nibelungen on DVD with some of my musicology friends. Part of me is still pretty alarmed at just how little music I actually listened to as part of my grad school. Like, I expected that I’d have to be really familiar with all these canonical works in order to get a musicology degree (even if only a master’s). But, except for Die Meistersinger, Wagner was talked about much more than listened to in my time at school. And experiencing greatly great music like the Ring cycle is part of the reason why some of us went into musicology in the first place, so (re)discovering it is now a way to get back into actually enjoying music without the stress of having to prepare term papers or seminar presentations about it.

Anyway, we started with Das Rheingold on Wednesday to whet the appetite with the prologue, but it was much overshadowed by last night’s screening of Die Walküre. The Met production we watched was about fifteen years old, but Jimmy Levine still rocked the pit with his Jew-fro and Jessye Norman made for one helluva Sieglinde. Brünnhilde wasn’t the most impressive vocally or visually (she looked middle-aged and kind of schoolmarmish) but had the iron breastplate. I really envied Wotan’s spear, which he would stand on the ground decisively whenever he decreed the fate of something or other. I want me one of those.

Going in with very little advance knowledge of the Ring story, I wasn’t really prepared for just how classically and epically (?) Greek the whole thing would be, with all these ambivalent deities and honorable heroes and whatnot. Also, I wasn’t expecting Siegmund and Sieglinde to actually know about their incest until several acts later (like a Luke-and-Leia thing). But no, not even so much as a pause. What chutzpah. And this was all in the first act.

The music seemed to get better with each act, and I just loved the final scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde. It was sincere in a way that made up for some of the more awkward lyrics in Act I about bulging veins in Siegmund’s temples and Sieglinde’s request for him to be quiet so that she could better appreciate his voice.

It also came to mind yesterday how my friends Dave and Charles took a tape of about nine minutes of the Ride of the Valkyries and used it for their answering machine greeting. Outstanding. If I remember correctly, they told me that one person actually waited out the entire time to leave a message.

So, yeah. I’m into it. We won’t be trying to recreate a Bayreuth thing of consecutive nights of Wagner-mania, so Siegmund will be watched later in the week